March 12, 2007
Uncle, Games, Hands
The frustrating thing is, I actually have quite a bit I want to say.
For example, I'm now an uncle. It's pretty awesome. Babies are tiny.
I also looked after a friend's hyper six year-old, which taught me that:
- Dogs are pretty patient.
- Of the members of the Saddle Club, I am apparently Phil, and thus allowed to ride Teddy.
- My actions are sometimes "so juvenile".
- I'm allowed to read chapters of Rainbow Magic books, but only if they have goblins in them, because I am a boy.
- Reading The Victorians aloud will send both C and a six year-old to sleep.
Useful stuff to know, now that I'm an uncle. :)
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Something that I think that people will enjoy: Dylan Hears A Who, old fashioned Bob Dylan singing Dr Seuss stories, with album covers and everything. I really liked the bouncy "Green Eggs and Ham", but they're all pretty good.
Something else that people might enjoy, based on the popularity of Singstar: Opera Slinger. (The basic idea is that it's a combination of platformer and karaoke game -- you must race your nemesis Aria to spotlights throughout your ruined opera house, and sing rock versions of classical tunes.) There's a YouTube video of the gameplay, andthe team that created it called themselves, "The Treblemakers", so how can you lose? You do need a USB microphone, though, so I haven't tried it myself.
I've actually been seeing a lot of interesting-looking free games. Some of them, like Opera Slinger, are written by students as part of a project -- Base Invaders is another example. (In this case, they've made a lemmings-like real-time strategy game, and it looks pretty fun; but again, I haven't had a chance to try it myself.)
There's even a cool article about teaching kids by getting them to write computer games. In the example that this article examines, they were looking at the issue of bullying; I don't know whether my teacher-friends can use the software that's mentioned, but if I didn't mention it, they couldn't look into it.
On the other side, I've found a number of games that people have made as teaching tools, rather than as a learning exercise. For example, someone has made a sim game out of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Called PeaceMaker, it has some interesting details -- for example, if you play the Israeli side, you have a lot more control over the variables that affect your popularity; but if you play the Palestinian leader, you can try to assassinate militants. It was originally a master's degree project at Carnegie-Mellon University, and there's an article on it at Gamasutra.
Another example is a Sim-like game about dealing with natural disasters, though I found the interface a little too fiddly to deal with. And there's Cultivation, which I have played a bit -- the writer is trying to make a game to explore how commune farming functions. It seems pretty good; or at least, I played in several times before moving on to mess about with other things.
On a lighter note... well, no, let me back up a bit. I'm assuming that any article that says, "The first section further explicates how the poststructuralist divide between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis plays out in the differences between the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series." is not entirely serious... but maybe I'm giving them too little credit. Anyway, the article in question is here, and I managed to get through it, so it can't be that bad.
And finally, the people who play Puzzle Pirates and so forth might be interested about this article about Whirled; it's by the same people, with the same online/Flash ideal, but they're wanting to allow player-created content and games. I'm not sure whether it'll work, or if they'll just get fifty knockoffs of Bejewelled (and the occasional lawsuit from the people whose games are ripped off); but it certainly seems an experiment worth trying. :)
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I've got feeling people may have seen this already, but just in case -- there's an artist who paints on hands. Fairly cool.
Which leads us to this YouTube clip, which lead one of the commenters to say, "That was like what would happen if awesomeness were made out of hands."
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I have lots more stuff to link to, but I guess I should ease back into this blogging thing. :)